The Puppet Master: Jodie Foster

The Oscar-winning legend talks about 'The Beaver,' Mel Gibson, and the power of women in modern Hollywood.

Soft-spoken and unassuming, Jodie Foster in person seems anything but the daredevil. But you don't get to be one of Hollywood's only actress-directors by being afraid to take chances. Being fiercely intelligent doesn't hurt, either.

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When she was not quite 13, Foster played a teenage prostitute opposite Robert De Niro (her favorite actor) in Taxi Driver. That same year, she portrayed a salty speakeasy queen in Bugsy Malone. A year later she was cast as a young murderess in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. Evolving from child star to leading lady, Foster won her first Best Actress Academy Award as a gang-rape survivor in The Accused. She took home her second Oscar as FBI investigator Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (a role turned down by Michelle Pfeiffer because she thought the serial-killer subject was too grisly). After making her directorial debut in Little Man Tate, Foster took on the unique challenge in Nell of playing a woman raised in the woods who speaks her own language because she's had no human contact except with her speech-impaired mother. Even as the urban vigilante in The Brave One, Foster brought a pathos to her role that elevated the movie above its Death Wish pedigree.

Now, with The Beaver, Foster has topped herself, directing and starring in one of the most unusual tales to come out of Hollywood in years. The Beaver tells the story of Walter Black, a once-successful toy executive and family man who suffers from suicidal depression. No matter what he tries, Walter can't seem to get himself back on track...until he begins talking to people through a beaver hand puppet he finds in a Dumpster.

"Originally, the story was a novel," Foster relates. "The writer [Kyle Killen] got halfway through it and realized he wanted to write a screenplay. I read the script and loved it. The beaver was the perfect metaphor for somebody who builds something and destroys at the same time."

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Foster plays Walter's long-suffering wife, Meredith, who buys into him as the beaver because it makes her socially withdrawn younger child, Henry (Riley Thomas Stewart), come alive. Only the couple's 17-year-old son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), who resents his father, finds the idea ridiculous.

Bringing such a bizarre script to the screen is daunting enough, though for Foster the task was made easier by her passion for the story. Upping the ante is the fact that Walter is played by Mel Gibson. The similarity between Walter's experiences and Gibson's recent real-life domestic troubles give the actor's performance an intriguing resonance. Despite his megawatt star power, Gibson has decided not to do interviews for the film. (After the release date was delayed several times, The Beaver finally opens nationally on May 20.) In a montage sequence, we watch as the news media simultaneously report and exploit Walter's beaver-puppet persona when his toy company starts to make money again. It's an eerie sequence that echoes all the negative press coverage Gibson got this past year.

Foster doesn't view this fascination with celebrity scandal as a social illness. "I don't look at it as a sickness," she says. "It's a normal human reaction that's been magnified by all the technology that increasingly is blurring the line between news and entertainment. Watching someone go through a personal agony...it can be exploited and trivialized by the process of being a media celebrity."

Gibson and Foster have been friends since they costarred in Maverick in 1994. Whatever Gibson's personal problems, he remains a fine yet underappreciated actor, perhaps because his offscreen behavior has tended to overshadow his achievements. His performance in The Beaver is completely convincing despite the weirdness of having to talk through a hand puppet.

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"He's an amazingly talented person," Foster enthuses. "We all know the strength he shows on the screen. He's also witty. He can be funny and charming. I knew he would bring an affability to the role of Walter. He's a soulful, interesting guy who knows a lot about struggle. And he's very articulate about that and is interested in all the things Walter is interested in. Transformation. Change. The relationship with his son."

Walter's use of the beaver puppet as a form of self-therapy isn't as absurd as it sounds. "Most therapists who work with children use puppets," Foster says, "especially with children under three years old. You have to think of the beaver as a survival tool. Walter grows up with a lot of money and is swallowed up by his emotions. If Walter really wants to change, then the personality he adopts, the way that he communicates, has to be a totally different one from himself. The beaver is like a working-class South London scrapper who is a leader and is confident and is kind of removed from emotion. He's got a handle on things. He's totally in control. These are all the things Walter needs to be."

With Foster at the helm, The Beaver swings from comedy to drama to tragedy and even horror. The auteur theory of filmmaking states it's the director's responsibility to give a movie a unified tone. In the case of The Beaver, though, that's probably undesirable, given the different moods that are allowed sway to jerk the viewer's emotions around.

"This is not a disease-of-the-week movie. It's challenging. We ask the audience to go for something that's high concept. It's a fable and very witty. There's a lot of comedy even to the base idea. Then we ask them little by little to abandon that. I think it's great, but it is unusual. Sometimes we had a scene that played too funny for where it was in the movie. And there were a couple of scenes we took out that I loved. They were comic but came too late, when the movie's dramatic trajectory had taken hold."

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The tonal challenges came into play especially in postproduction. "Trying to get the tone right. Trying to get everybody used to the fact that it's a drama. Trying to honor where the film needed to head and assuage everybody's fears about that. It wasn't easy."

Although the film has comic elements, Foster is emphatic that her movie is about depression and how it can wreak havoc on a family. Despite all the strange twists and turns, it tells in very direct terms how a fractured family finds a way to heal itself. "For instance, Walter can't connect with his younger son because he's too exhausted," Foster says. "That's what depression does to you. So when Henry, his little boy, gets something back that feels genuine and loving, what does he care whether it's a puppet or not? In fact, maybe it's easier in some ways."

The film's shifts in tone parallel Walter's emotional swings, which of course impact on his wife and kids. "In a family where somebody suffers from depression, everyone else is touched by it. A family is a web, this weird tapestry where we're woven together. That's something that fascinates me. This frustrating web. What is beautiful and horrible about marriage is when you love somebody, you're stuck having to go through their feelings and constantly making decisions about whether it's worth it. Walter's wife has to change too. She wants to go back, go back to the past, when she and Walter were fun, were young, and were joyful. Walter loved her and everything was okay and she wants to do that again. And Walter's answer is that man's dead and they have to move into the future. And if she can't move into the future with him, he can't move with her. I think every longtime couple goes through that moment where someone is clinging to the past and someone else will want to move into the future."

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Porter, the couple's teenage son, expresses his animosity toward his father by hanging Post-its in his bedroom that remind him of all the reasons he doesn't want to grow up to be like Walter. There's the hint that this OCD-like behavior means he may be headed for his own bout with depression. At the same time there's a filial bond between father and son that makes it difficult if not impossible to sever ties completely. Foster dramatizes the minuses as well as the pluses of this delicate bond. And she makes no secret of the fact that the film struck a personal nerve.

"Sometimes I don't want to be like my mom, and yet I am like her. It's something you can't really escape. There's a part of you that's connected to your parents either in a dark way or in a light way. When Porter was a little kid, all he wanted was to be like his dad. Then he grew up and he wanted to be anything but him. The movie explores whether he's ready to recover, stop running away from what he is afraid of, and start running toward what he is. Everybody goes through that with their parents. The process of growing away from them and growing back."

Foster's first self-directed film, Little Man Tate, told the story of a child intelligent beyond his years and how his single, working-class mom tries to give him a normal life. The autobiographical echoes to Foster's own childhood are there. Foster was amazingly mature at an early age, acting in Disney movies as young as age five and being exposed early to experiences on the set that allowed her to think about directing someday, a vocation few actresses dream possible.

"One day I came to the set of The Courtship of Eddie's Father and Bill Bixby was directing one of the episodes. I remember being amazed because I didn't know actors were allowed to direct. I was so excited and thought it was the greatest thing. I thought I could do that too someday."

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Foster points to Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar (for 2009's The Hurt Locker), as a hopeful sign that opportunities for women to direct will increase. Films by women that would make hundreds of millions of dollars would help too. In the late '80s and early '90s, Penny Marshall directed two movies, Big and A League of Their Own, that grossed more than $100 million. "Women directors are not just personal directors or indie directors," she says. "Yes, I make personal movies. That's because they're what I'm interested in."

Being your own director has its drawbacks. "You plan stuff as a director and the actress in you is privy to all that information, which is fantastic. Things go much faster because you know what you want and then you achieve it. The problem is, you don't get any surprises. You don't get as many choices. That's what many director-actors lament: They wish they had more material to work from."

In chronicling one family's battle with depression, The Beaver offers no easy answers, but it does conclude on a hopeful note. "Life is hard, and everyone experiences that and has to process things that are difficult to process," Foster says ruefully. "If something tragic happens, there's no little pill that can take the feelings away, but you don't have to be alone."